infolibre

Friday, November 30, 2001

On December 5 at 8:30 a.m., the Colorado Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the Tattered Cover Book Store's appeal to protect the privacy rights of bookstore customers.

On October 20, 2000, Denver District Court Judge J. Stephen Phillips ordered Tattered Cover to reveal the contents of one of its shipping envelopes that police had removed from the trash of a suspected drug dealer. Law enforcement authorities seeking the records asserted that they would assist in a case involving the manufacture of methamphetamines. The books were found at the site of an illegal methamphetamine laboratory.

The Denver bookstore has argued that protecting the privacy of customers' book purchase records was a crucial First Amendment fight . . .

Several months ago, when Chicagoan Jim Finn discovered that the Chicago Public Library was closing its 16-millimeter film collection -- not surprising given declining use and the cost of upkeep -- he started doing everything he could to rally public interest in preserving this material, doing something comparable to what writer Nicholson Baker has recently done for newspapers. Screening this weekend is the second of two extended programs showcasing a small portion of the library's collection -- a rich array of material ranging from documentaries to children's films to one of Luis Buñuel's best Mexican features. It looks like a compendium of priceless, irreplaceable work.

Where else could you catch Fat Albert: Junk Food (1976, 14 min.), Madeline (1965, 10 min.), and The Wonder of Dolphins (1974, 11 min.) all in one afternoon? I wish more people would encourage their library to drag out its dusty-but-fascinating holdings and shake 'em for the world . . .

2. Always use the most obscure language possible. Get lots of big scholarly words from a dictionary and use them often:

Poor: "Things are bad."

Better: "The formative mechanism of culture amounts to a reification of human activities which fixates the living and models the transmission of experience from one generation to another on the transmission of commodities; a reification which strives to ensure the past's domination over the future."

"An exhibition of books which have survived fire, the sword and the censors," originally staged in 1955 at the University of Kansas and recreated online in 1998 in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Library Bill of Rights.

H-Utopia, like the 25-year-old Society for Utopian Studies, is devoted to discussion of utopianism in all its forms, from literary expression to policy analysis to architectural criticism to activism. Our focus is on the forms, contents, and influence of utopian/dystopian thinking.

The personal library of author Franz Kafka is to be returned to his native Prague. The manuscripts, including some of the first editions of his work, had been owned by car giant Porsche. The German auto manufacturer said it had acquired his library from an antiquarian book dealer in Stuttgart with a view to handing it over to the Franz Kafka Society in the Czech Republic. The collection, which comprises some 1,000 books and other documents, has been valued at around £80,000 . . .